With the improvement of people's material and cultural life, a variety of home appliances go into thousands of households. Among them, household appliances with remote control become more and more, and a variety of remote controls at home also become more and more (typically a TV remote control, an air conditioning remote control, a set-top box remote control, etc.), thereby daily storage, search and use of the remote controls are very inconvenient. If the remote control of an old model of the home appliance is lost, it is impossible to find a same remote control. Now, mobile communication terminals, such as mobile phones and PADs, are the most commonly used handheld communication devices by people, and everybody is used to carry the mobile phone and often keeps the mobile phone at hand. Therefore, many people want to use the mobile phone also as the remote control of the home appliance. Now, the hardware and software of a smart phone have been very strong, and a large-size touch screen may be designed into a controller having a variety of keyboard layouts. As long as there is a proper software to establish a standard appliance wireless adaptation protocol, the smart phone can be used as a universal remote control of the household appliances. However, even if the above-mentioned problems are solved, the conventional manual remote control method still has deficiencies.
For example, when watching TV, the user suddenly wants to see “Hunan Satellite TV”, but he/she does not know the channel number of Hunan Satellite TV. At this time, the process of the manual remote control is as follows: the user picks up the remote control to aim at the TV, and then continuously pluses or minuses the channel number, or the user calls up a program menu for query. Obviously, this operation is relatively cumbersome since there are generally one or two hundreds of channels. Further, if the user only knows the name of the program to be seen, such as “Where are we going, Dad?”, and does not know the channel number, he/she can only tune out a more detailed program menu to query. There is also a problem that if the program desired to be seen has not yet broadcasted, and the user wants to fall back to the previous channel, because the existing remote control only supports switch between the last two channels, the user cannot return back to the previous channel, and only can find it channel by channel. For another example, when watching TV while eating, which everybody did, if you want to tune the channel, then you have to put down the bowl and chopsticks in your hands and pick up the remote control. In the case that things to eat are in the hand, the user needs to wash their hands first and then change the channel. It can be seen that the existing manual remote control method has the problems of inconvenient operation, low efficiency and poor satisfaction of user experience.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.